Large Hadron Collider

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/09/10/black-hole-cern.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/10/large.hadron.collider

The Large Hadron Collider went online today. Some of my friends were going to have an "end of the world" party, but since they aren't actually doing any collisions yet, it's been postponed. I read a comic today whose joke rested on science nerds using this as an excuse for a party. But you know, if the world were actually going to end, I think I'd rather be at home with my family.

I like the point the guy makes at the end of the first article, that if people get hyped up about black holes and find out about this accelerator, then more people might get excited about the stuff physicists are going to be able to research with it. I wish I had more scientific background to understand the second article better; I didn't know that the Higgs boson had anything to do with the origin of mass.

It's pretty incredible that humans have managed to create technology that lets us study this kind of thing, and that the technology is SO big while the particles are SO small. I wonder what the energy consumption of the LHC is?